OVAE Welcomes Flavia Jiménez!

Flavia Jiménez comes to OVAE through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program from a 10-year professional career in the non-profit sector in her work on immigration. Her most recent position was at the National Immigration Forum, where she worked on issues of immigrant integration, including citizenship and vocational English language learning. Prior to that, Jiménez worked at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, where she directed a multi-ethnic citizenship program and also raised funds. Jiménez has been a senior policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza, where she worked to defeat state- level anti-immigrant legislation and on national comprehensive immigration reform. Prior to that, she was an employment attorney at Casa of Maryland Inc., representing employment- and immigration-related cases. There, she began a domestic workers committee and worked with women victims of trafficking. Jiménez is a member of the District of Columbia Bar.

In her 10 years of working with the immigrant community, whether in the courtroom, in Congress providing information about comprehensive immigration reform or directing programs to help them achieve the dream of citizenship, Jiménez has based her efforts on the belief that in our democracy, diversity is our strength. She views the current immigration process needing reform and believes strongly that a more just society lies in our collective power to assist immigrants and refugees in becoming U.S. citizens and help them become active through civic participation. She believes that when education, the ultimate civil rights equalizer, is a priority, such a society is possible—for a five-year-old from Honduras entering the U.S. school system as well as for a 34-year-old Filipina mother wanting to learn English and become a nurse.

CLASP Career Pathways Initiative

Partnering with 10 states, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) has initiated and will lead the state-driven effort The Alliance for Quality Career Pathways (AQCP). The goal is to establish benchmarks for high-quality career pathways and to identify the most relevant metrics for measuring student and program success. Representatives from Arkansas, California, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin will meet over the duration of this two-year effort. The purpose of this national framework is to help existing pathway programs improve in quality and to accelerate the development of new pathways for individuals who need postsecondary training and credentials to improve their chances of success in the workplace. According to Evelyn Ganzglass, director of workforce development at CLASP, “Career pathways could help nearly 48 million workers who need better skills and wages for economic advancement.”

Career pathways provide a coordinated amalgam of education and training services that assist students, oftentimes employed students, to progress successfully to more advanced levels of education and employment in a particular industry or occupational sector. These initiatives focus on low-skilled adults and out-of-school youths to prepare them to compete for higher-skilled jobs through training in specific skill areas.

In its work, CLASP identified a large number of resources focusing on the design and development of career pathways, and other resources for identifying the key elements of a pathways approach. Yet, according to CLASP, “There are no existing and verified guidelines to help state and local career pathways administrators ensure that they are building a high-quality effort that is likely to yield the strongest possible student outcomes. This is the goal of the AQCP, which will be achieved through a consensus-building process driven by the most successful career pathways states.”